Initial Impressions: Literature of Exhaustion (1967)

'Literature of Exhaustion' by American writer John Barth, is generally considered the quintessential essay on post modernism. It was widely misinterpreted in his time as beckoning the death of the novel and he had to write a 'Literature of Replenishment' a decade later to counter it.

Barth starts the essay with a disclaimer that it was the "used-upness" of certain forms that he wants to denounce and not the physical, moral, intellectual aspect of art. He doubts the then fashionable “intermedia” arts’ stand of rejecting not just the tradition in art but the traditional notion of the artist, whereby a controlling artist might run the risk of being considered a fascist in those terms.

Why then is this essay often equated to a pamphlet on post modernism? I think it comes down to his argument – a writer whose work is technically “out of date is likely to be a genuine defect” he says, even Beethoven might sound outdated if he weren’t put forth in “the Borgesian spirit” (Ironic intent might save it, he suggests later on in the essay). Jorge Luis Borges is Barth’s muse, a technically up to date artist poised against the league of old fashioned/ up to date non artists (The last one, I guess, is the most dangerous of all venereal diseases that inflicted post modernists). 

Speaking of the literature of exhausted possibilities, he viewed Borge’s ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ as an original work and not as one that mimics the fictional superiority of Menard’s immersive reproduction (In the story, Menard replicates Don Quixote word to word but is hailed as superior to Cervantes because of the way he immerses himself in the act of writing) Barth says of Borges, 

“..he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work”

Barth likens Borges to Greek hero Theseus who knows better than to exhaust all pathways leading to the Minotaur in the Cretan Labyrinth.  Borges is the non-baroque artist who, following Ariadne’s thread, prefers to acknowledge the existence rather than exhaust all literary possibilities.

He does contemplate the advent of similar possibilities by other writers as well (Beckett, Nabokov) if the then contemporary literary scene decides to close its door on the conventional novel. The novel may or may not perish but the work created in such apocalyptic ambience cannot be invalidated. 

"If you took a bunch of people out into the desert and the world didn’t end, you’d come home shamefaced, I imagine; but the persistence of an art form doesn’t invalidate work created in the comparable apocalyptic ambience. This is one of the fringe benefits of being an author instead of a prophet."

Literature of Exhaustion - John Barth